Walther P5 - Number 2

The slide on this one tells you exactly what it is before you ever pick it up. Roll-marked Carl Walther Waffenfabrik Ulm/Do and stamped simply P5, this is the police pistol that carried West Germany through the back half of the Cold War. And it wears the marking "Number 2," a low designation that earns a second look from anyone who pays attention to where a pistol sits within a run.

The P5 was Walther's answer to the German police trials of the 1970s, when agencies wanted something safer and more modern than the old PP and P38 holdovers. What they got pulls straight from the P38 lineage, the same locked-breech tilting wedge design, but turned inward. The barrel ejects spent cases up and out the top through that distinctive open slide section, which keeps the breech face shrouded and the ejection port off the side entirely. It's a layout you won't mistake for anything else.

Look at the metal and you can read its life. The slide shows honest finish wear along the high edges and flats, with the muzzle end of the barrel going bright where the bluing has thinned. The frame keeps deeper color. The black checkered grips are crisp, anchored by a single slot-head screw on each panel, and the decocking lever rides on the left side where the thumb expects it.

Mechanically it runs the double-action first pull into a clean single-action break that made the platform respected across European departments. The hammer drops safely with the decocker, and the fixed sights sit low and snag-free.

For a collector chasing the German service pistols of the era, the P5 fills a specific slot between the P38 that came before and the polymer guns that followed. This one carries its years openly and asks to be handled rather than shelved.